This guest post by Dermot Horgan describes his winning design for the recent RCPI Student Architecture Competition, held as part of the College's annual St Luke's Symposium. This year the College celebrated 150 years in our beautiful home at No 6 Kildare Street. As part of celebrations, architectural students were asked to re-imagine the College building and provide a new design based on the original brief from 1860. Dermot finished his 4-year BSc(Hons) in Architecture this year in CCAE Cork School of Architecture. He is currently working for Scott Tallon Walker Architects on a year out before he returns to college to start his M.Arch next year.
Concept
The design for the Royal College of
Physicians of Ireland attempts to replace the already fractured urban block and
[re]appropriate the plot with a college that feeds from the introduction of a
new lane to the northern elevation of the site (Dr. John Stearne Lane). This in
turn enables a layering and merging of both functionality and public/private
interaction. The overlapping of functions and hierarchy of spaces (both
vertically and horizontally across the site from west to east) physically
manifest as a new series of urban ‘blocks’ stacked above and around one another
creating a series of staggered and ultimately active elevations.
Site
The site to the Northern end of Kildare
Street presents as part of an urban block. The street; proportionate in scale
and aesthetic consideration, but alas this ‘block’ is ultimately unwelcoming to
pedestrian ingress. Thus it was a primary goal of the project to address this
issue of privacy and public involvement on both the site and in the college as
a whole. This opportunity to engage people from Kildare Street into the
external plaza on the lower ground floor immediately distinguishes the site as
open or welcoming to all, whilst a consideration for privacy led to the
introduction of a façade that is both penetrable but also has the ability to be
closed to the street through rotating external screens in the public space set
on the edge of the site on the western elevation.
Set
in planks of limestone, wedged together to form an ‘urban grid’ in which an
external plaza is contained. The grid attempts to abstract the essence of the
adjacent Georgian terrace building.
This
space also provides the break–out zone for the most public space in the
college, the ‘Large lecture theatre’. The external grand stairs that carries
pedestrian footfall into the site is distinguished through the widening of the
grid at that part. The reception and part of the college museum also sit
directly adjacent to this threshold, the wall of staggered timber louvres;
containing space for exhibiting medical instruments whilst separating the
reception and lecture theatre from one another. This series of louvres is then
continued (albeit subtly) externally in order to distinguish the formal
entrance to those entering the reception and further reinforced through placing
this in the under-croft of the level above.
Carving the form of the college into
distinct blocks enables light to flow into the lane and the college spaces
simultaneously. The layers of accommodation within the college become
increasingly more private beginning with the lane; acting as the most informal
public zone [auditorium/lecture theatre, cafe, Grand Hall, and w/c) to the
private top floor office accommodation, seminar spaces and external office
accommodation break-out area. Concrete acts to enforce the ‘weight’ of the
college as an institution but also enables the creation of large
multifunctional spaces not essentially unlike that of a studio space.
Light
Light is introduced and captured in the
building according to the orientation of the sun, where light can be brought
from above; one block is slipped past the other in order to create the space
for the introduction of light. Where this is not possible large windows attempt
to draw light from the south in order to best suit the space.
The
library is contained within a ‘pod’ as to formally distinguish it from the
reading room on the same floor, here light is taken from the roof light above
but filtered down into the space in order to create an atmosphere that
distinguishes the importance of the library and its contents to the RCPI.